From the review by Dave Itzkoff, in the New York Times
“Spook Country,” Gibson’s first novel since “Pattern Recognition,”
moves farther from science-fiction speculation and immerses itself fully
in modernist realism. More than a post-9/11 novel, it is arguably the
first example of the post-post-9/11 novel, whose characters are tired of
being pushed around by forces larger than they are — bureaucracy,
history and, always, technology — and are at long last ready to start
pushing back
Structurally, “Spook Country” rotates among the
perspectives of three characters. The first is Hollis Henry, a member of
a defunct rock band that enjoyed modest cult success. Now a writer for a
magazine no one seems to have heard of, she’s investigating a high-tech
art subculture for an enigmatic employer whose interests in the
movement may transcend objective journalism
The second is Tito, a
Cuban-Chinese immigrant who’s recruited into a series of espionage
missions by an old man who Tito hopes can shed light on his father, who
died under mysterious circumstances
Finally, there is Milgrim,
an amphetamine addict and an expert of sorts in obscure details of
communication and cryptography. He’s in thrall to a government stooge
named Brown, who forces Milgrim to accompany him on his own
surreptitious spying assignments by threatening to cut off his drug
supply, and whom Milgrim occasionally suspects might not really be a
government agent at all, and might just be a jerk with a gun. (Only he
doesn’t use a word as nice as “jerk.”)
What initially unites these
seemingly unrelated narratives is a theme familiar to Gibson’s work:
the novice initiated into an alternative reality he or she never knew
existed. But in each of these strands, Gibson is also playing on the
word “spook,” not just in the slang sense of a spy, but also in the more
traditional sense of a ghost — of figures who pass through the world
unnoticed and unrecognized, and who are about to find out how empowering
anonymity can be
At first, Hollis, the
musician-turned-journalist, emerges as the novel’s most intriguing
character. (Surely Gibson didn’t need the experience of interviewing
U2
for Wired magazine to learn how it feels to be a rock star.) Her
investigations introduce her to a form of expression called locative
art, in which “spatially tagged hypermedia” and a sophisticated visor
allow an observer to view images in the real world that are otherwise
invisible to passersby: don the glasses in front of the Viper Room in
West Hollywood and see an artist’s virtual recreation of the moment when
River Phoenix died; stand in the world music section of the Virgin
Megastore while wearing them and see
F. Scott Fitzgerald suffer a heart attack
It’s
a setup that lets Gibson riff on the immortality of celebrity, and
reveal a side of himself that, though it may not be optimistic about the
future, is at least willing to concede that the past is still up for
grabs. (“The past isn’t dead,” Hollis muses aloud, in a nod to Faulkner.
“It’s not even past.”) More important, locative art becomes a potent
metaphor for a disjointed world where anyone can experience reality as
he chooses to see it, and no two people’s observations of the same place
or event need coincide in any way. If locative art went mainstream, one
character predicts, “The world we walk around in would be channels.
But
in later chapters, I found myself more fascinated with Milgrim, who
sees his relationship to Brown as a twisted, 21st-century upgrade of Tom
and Huck, and who wonders just how involuntary his servitude really is.
And when Milgrim glances at a beat-up copy of a book on Europe’s
history of revolutionary messianism that he just happens to keep in his
coat pocket, he provides Gibson with another laboratory to synthesize
his limitless curiosity about technology with his deep misgivings about
the modern world
Under the dominance of Catholicism, Milgrim
thinks, medieval Europe was a “one-channel universe ... broadcasting
from Rome,” a province with “a hierarchy in place and a highly organized
methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced
by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy
constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.
Of course,
Gibson doesn’t have to reach as far back as medieval Europe to find a
realm plagued by a unitary broadcast in dire need of being drowned out,
and it is not only Milgrim who lives his life alternately in obedience
and resistance to his autocratic masters. And as “Spook Country” refers
to the spectacle of
George W. Bush’s jet-fighter landing aboard the aircraft carrier
Abraham Lincoln,
examines the true function of terrorism (“to frighten you into
surrendering the rule of law”) and explains how torture fundamentally
undermines the process of intelligence gathering, it is not only the
novel’s central characters who are left to wonder what has become of, as
one character puts it, “the country he hoped was still America.
When
the three narrative strands of “Spook Country” at last converge, almost
300 pages into the novel and just in the nick of time, they culminate
in a climactic prank meant to deliver an accountability moment to some
shadowy off-screen figures who have so far avoided blame for the world’s
ills. And you may wonder, as I did, briefly, if this slick,
“Seinfeld”-ian resolution was really worth all the events that preceded
it
But I don’t think that’s the lesson of “Spook Country.” The
point is that its protagonists are ultimately able to channel their
feelings of detachment and insignificance into something meaningful and
pleasantly destructive — and it is precisely because of their apparent
insignificance that they are able to do so. When they breathe a sigh of
relief for the invitingly uncertain world that awaits them, Gibson can,
too: the future is a clean slate for all of them, and whether his
characters realize it or not, the author surely understands that this is
a symbol of ultimate freedom.
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Dave Itzkoff writes the Across the Universe column for the Book Review.
